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Wednesday, June 3, 2015

#1382: Robert Bigelow(?)

We’re a bit unsure about this one, but we suppose he’s worth
a mention. Robert Bigelow is a hotel and aerospace entrepreneur;
in particular, he is the owner of the hotel chain Budget Suites of America and
the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, the latter of which is particularly known for
launching two experimental space modules, Genesis I and Genesis II, and for
their plans for full-scale manned space habitats to be used as orbital hotels,
research labs and factories. Bigelow is currently building the BEAM module for
launch to the International Space Station,
with launch planned for 2015 on the eighth SpaceX cargo resupply mission.

Indeed, Bigelow has done quite a bit for science, including
funding for plenty of valuable research. However, Bigelow also has a penchant
for pseudoscience and bullshit, and much of his money have gone into research
(not particularly scientific) on alien abductions,
cattle mutilations and suchlike. Indeed, Bigelow himself is president and founder of the National
Institute for Discovery Science, which focuses on precisely the phenomena
mentioned, and in the course of realizing his space adventure dreams he has contracted
MUFON with
potentially very large sums of money for the pursuit of first-hand UFO information.
Indeed, longtime UFO activist Ed Komarek has suggested that Bigelow’s goal is
nothing less than an “alien reengineering project.” Bigelow’s proposal, at
least, is to generously fund the efforts of MUFON investigators to enable them
to respond quickly to alleged UFO incidents, contracting plenty of scientists
to investigate the claims and so on.

But why does it matter that Bigelow spends his money on
whatever bullshit he might fancy? For one thing, it (obviously) ties up
resources that could have been used infinitely better; elsewhere moreover, such
efforts tend to result in lending a sheen of legitimacy to the crazy, as for
instance in the case of the Robert Bigelow’s endowed Chair of Consciousness
Studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, the goal of which was to teach
courses on such subjects as dreams, meditation, hypnosis, out-of-body experiences,
telepathy,
and drug-induced altered states of consciousness. Bigelow pulled the plug on the program in 2002,
but during its existence it did much to promote the pseudoscience of its directors,
parapsychologist Charles Tart and later Raymond Moody,
who surely have done quite a bit to popularize this kind of cargo cult science.
Now, it is not entirely clear why the program was axed, but perhaps Bigelow
came to realize that it produced nothing of scientific value whatsoever?

Diagnosis: I am reluctant to accuse Bigelow of being an
outright loon, and there is little doubt that he has made many positive
contributions to science and civilization. But he has also done a bit to
facilitate the promulgation of ridiculous pseudoscience – and at least the
effort to give such pseudoscience a sheen of legitimacy – and although his
negative contributions may not outweigh his positive ones, he probably merits a
mention.